Instead, they justified vegetarian food habits as scientific.Īlso read: The IITs have a long history of systematically othering Dalit studentsĭue to their early entry into the Western education and their knowledge of English, it was the upper castes and Brahmins who benefitted, reshaped and negotiated these new forms of knowledge.
Though these scientists continue to be vegetarians, they did not associate their food habits with their caste backgrounds. Food becomes a way of preserving their cultural and caste memory. Some Brahmin scientists I spoke to informed me that they had tried non-vegetarian food when they were in Western universities. Even though Brahmins and other upper caste students and researchers ate at the B, and C mess, majority of the Dalits and non-Brahmins ate either at the B or at the C mess. IISc has three major student dining halls (Mess), called A, B, and C: A mess is for pure-vegetarian food, B mess is for north Indian vegetarian and non-vegetarian food and C mess is for south Indian vegetarian and non-vegetarian food.
The majority of the Brahmin scientists I spoke to at IISc were vegetarian. The domination of vegetarianism in India cannot be merely seen as food preference and choice as reports show that there are cases of discrimination on what one eats and cases reported on the existence of separate wash basins and entrances for vegetarians and non-vegetarians for example, as mentioned previously, in IIT Madras. Many virtues of Brahmin culture have been normalised in the scientific institutional settings. The entry of non-Brahmin scientists has not changed this image. Available data from other leading scientific and technical institutions such as IITs also show the absence of Dalits and OBC scientists. It is still demographically and culturally dominated by Brahmin and upper caste scientists. Official data clearly show that the demography of IISc has changed little. Most of the scientists who work at IISc obtained their PhDs or postdoctoral training from leading American or British universities. This absence led me to undertake ethnographic fieldwork at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), one of Asia’s leading scientific research institutions.Īlso read: Tamil Brahmins were the earliest to frame merit as a caste claim, and it showed in IITs Available data show few scientists from the Dalit and other marginalised sections in most of the leading Indian scientific and technical educational institutions. They have been perceived to be the natural inheritors of scientific practice, an assertion reaffirmed by scientists and researchers during my fieldwork in Bangalore, India.Įven after the introduction of various inclusive policies such as reservations for marginalised groups in educational institutions, there is a stark absence of such groups in India’s leading scientific research institutions. The domination of Brahmin and the upper caste scientists have given a Brahmanical identity to science in India.